Broken Freedom
by Phoenix of the Waves
Summary: Liesel's life after the bomb destroys much of her life. Very short. Written in the style of the Book Thief. Slight A/U. Anger and despair included.
1. Chapter 1

The clouds clustered tightly together like the delicate snowflakes of winter, then spread out just as quickly. A sigh from the book thief's mouth emanated. If you had asked her what was wrong, she would have said that she was tired or that she had eaten too much porridge that morning and her stomach was bothering her or that she just wanted to be left alone. But I knew better.

**A small note:**

**Liesel Meminger was, in her own way, mourning.**

"Saumensch..." she muttered under her breath, tasting the words on her lips and trying to remember how somebody she had once known had said them, "Saukerl..." Tears fell guiltily from her eyelids and landed heavily on the windowsill. She wiped them away, wiped away the grief and sorrow and frustration with her dry hand. If only life was so simple. Her hair hung limply from her head like a rag-doll without stuffing and her eyes had lost their cunning shine. The book-thief was not dealing well.  
"Liesel, my dear!" came the blank and tall voice of Ms. Klein, the "keeper." In reality, Liesel had no keeper. No matter how far she fell into the obviously deep pit that she had dug, Liesel Meminger would never lose her fight. And so, quite simply, she did not respond.  
"Liesel!" The call came again. A humorless smile played across the girl's lips. She found the woman's attempt at "kindness" rather amusing. I, for one, do not believe that Ms. Klein had an ounce of sense about human nature in her bony frame. She was clueless, and Liesel knew it.  
"Saumensch!" yelled the girl, the words of her stealings whirling nimbly through her mind. "I-I... come eat," came the reply. As you may guess, this response angered the thin girl. Her dark eyebrows curled inward like clenched fists, her eyes became more sinister than black, the color of death, and she decided to do something rather risky.

**What Liesel Meminger decided to do:**

**Break the window**

It happened quite quickly, a single good hit to the glass to send it shattering. Liesel imagined it as Rudy and Mama and Papa. There was a single scream from the kitchen, but I could tell that it was not one of disapproval or disdain. This was a scream of fear. The fat tears taunted Liesel and laughed as they cleaned her cheeks with their purifying oils. She did not make a sound when the glass burrowed into her bare, callused toes or when her fingers were poked and slashed. Not even when she landed hard on the pile of rubble outside and her blood stained the grass. At least she had left Klein with the colors of Christmas. Liesel stood quickly, her face blank and emotionless, and picked a single shard from her palm before running. I never saw Liesel Meminger again and that night, under the tattered, brown blankets of Death, a boy with the hair of a smile screamed.


	2. Chapter 2: Watching Freedom Break

I had never admired Rudy as much as Liesel had. He was valiant, yes, but a boy all the same, a boy caught in the middle of catastrophe, and who just wanted to be free. His soul was soft in my arms, and it stopped fighting my touch a few moments after it left the broken body.  
**A somewhat sad truth:**  
**Rudy Steiner was ready to die.**  
I carried him more gingerly than most, for although I didn't love him, the transparent bones of his spirit were frailer than those of the others, and I feared that, if I snapped them, he would live forever wishing, wishing, wishing, even after death. Which was, no matter how little care I had for comfort, an unusually harsh punishment for such a child. The young ones were the beings that somehow brought out some sort of almost-human reason in me.  
That day was a long one, with so many, too many, souls to hitch to my back. Even the immortal can only hold the weight of so much despair. Some were old, and most were young. One family, a girl and a woman, lay strewn across a single room, their reflective eyes staring up to the unexisting Heavens as if to plead for freedom. The girl's hand was close to the mother's cheek, as if to caress it, as if to ask for more, as if to hold on to one last hope. I swooped them both up. The mother was easy, light and airy, despair having already crushed her dreams. But the girl was harder. She didn't sit up for me like so many of the others, but struggled against my touch, like a snake against a man, twirling and biting, over and over, but never truly succeeding in freeing itself. But, like the man, I was able to tug her, hard, and the convulsing was put to an end.  
I carried them all back to the cave of darkness, where all souls are destined, for it has the weight of anger to pen them all in, along with the salty taste of tears, which the souls feast off of. The spirits from that day swept mournfully down, down, down, farther and farther into the darkness, save two.  
**The pair who stayed:**  
**Rudy Stiener and the girl with the stubborn soul.**  
I watched them instead of pushing them on, for I did not have time for shoving. The job of Death is a difficult one indeed. And so they sat, one a muddled yellow and the other a deep red. Even after deceasement, Rudy Steiner could still be described as lemon-colored. The two were wary of each-other at first, their weak spines grinding against one-another as they smiled blankly into the black pool of blood which, naturally, covered the floor of the cave. And yes, I do believe that they both had their reasons. The girl's: She had not yet accepted this strange other-world and believed, quite frankly, that if she feigned joy, she may somehow "wake up." And Rudy Steiner, well, Rudy's reason, on the other hand, was much more simple.  
**Rudy's reason:**  
**The girl was not the Book Thief.**

The first one to murmur was the girl. She turned her flickering not-head towards Rudy Steiner's bright-dull one, so that, for a moment, her not-nose passed through his not-forehead, and whispered in his ear. "Wo sind wir?" Her voice came out soft despite the fear and panic that it possessed, and it took Rudy's jumbled not-brain a moment to comprehend it. Where are we? the girl had said. A flash passed through Rudy's eyes, a flash like the one that would have flickered inside of him when his fist was making contact with one of the neighbors' noses, or when he was about to dart into a farmer's field to pull an apple that wasn't his off of a spindly, little tree, or when Liesel called him a "Saumensch." The list had gone on and on. But, you see, after life has been extinguished, human traits fade quickly. It is unusual, quite unusual, to be cunning in death. And as Rudy's eyes blurred slowly into a dull gray, I saw confusion pricking at his mouth. Even he did not understand. But he answered all the same. "Hier," he breathed, his sad grin pulling up at the edges, as if controlled by some unseen force. Here.  
The girl's smile followed suit then, tightening and stretching until it appeared almost painful. "Ja," she sighed, "Ja." They sat there for some time, then, now facing each-other, their not-eyes baring heartily into the swollen water surrounding their not-feet. And then Rudy's not-hand lifted, and he began to reach for the girl. Maybe it was because she had once been alive, or maybe it was simply the fact that she had stayed there with him when all of the other lonely souls had drooped away into the darkness. But no matter what the reason, one lemon-not-hand faltered towards one pomegranate-not-hand. I presumed that the girl, filled with sadness and disbelief, would move away from this reach, this unusual attempt of a stranger to touch her. I was wrong.  
**What the girl did:**  
**She stayed still**.  
Their not-fingers melted into one-another, for they were anything but solid, and their not-hearts began to beat as a single drum-beat, for they were anything but stable. Yellow and red, on a Earth, might have turned the bold color of a setting sun, but, in the dark cave off Death, puss and blood became a glimmering rainbow of colors, changing shade at an undeniably rapid rate. But this gesture, Rudy's gesture, was not meant to be romantic. It was not something that would be done at a small, candle-lit table or on a slow stroll in a park glimmering with laughter. This was a motion of comfort. And the girl knew it, for why else, I beg, tell me, would she have stayed there when Rudy's hand became part of her own?

And so they stayed still, the stubborn and the cunning, frozen in the seemingly infinite moment, feeling the ice-cold fingers of the others melting into their own. In the not-eyes of the other, they saw the incredibly ugly mess in the place that they had once called girl watched as what had once been her home was scooped into a large, gray truck and hauled away, as the stooping workers came and began and ended their hammering, sawing, smoothing, and as an obliviously grinning elderly woman took her place there, forgetting, or not knowing, of the pain that the blood-stained soil over which she was meant to live.  
And Rudy, well, Rudy watched the only person that had stayed firm in his memory through his suffering. The Book Thief. Liesel. He observed her as she bit her lip and pretended that she didn't hurt. He grimaced as she was shoved into the arms of a tired-looking, nail-gnawing woman, and forced into a small, isolated bedroom. He smiled, a real smile, when she broke the window with her fist and sent pieces of glass flying through the air like crystals. But when I came to him and whispered in his ear the truth, the boy with the soul the color of a daffodil screamed.


End file.
